Worldbuilding Wednesday: Prompt 2
A boost for mid-Nanoing (or whenever you might need it!)
Here we are, slap in the middle of Nanowrimo month! This is often when things start to get hard even for those Nanoers who’ve been keeping pace so far. It’s the sloggy, saggy, sloppy middle, much-feared and much-lamented.
Meanwhile, those of us who haven’t been keeping par start to look at that graph and think that it’s just impossible. Utterly insurmountable. The month is half over, and we’re nowhere near halfway to 50k. Well, as I’ve said before, that’s just fine. “Winning” Nanowrimo doesn’t have to mean hitting that target. Every word you didn’t have before is a victory.
But if you’d like a little nudge towards churning out some words, that’s what Worldbuilding Wednesday is here to help with!
This week’s prompt could be a minor part of your overall story, just afflicting a scene or two — or it could turn into a major device, shaping the whole arc for your characters. Or maybe it’s something that happened before your story even begins. (I’m a big fan of, when I’m stuck, jumping far forward or far backward in time, to help me understand where my characters came from and where they’re going).
So here’s Worldbuilding Wednesday Prompt #2:
The weather takes a sudden unseasonable turn. How does your character deal with it? Do they attribute any religious or supernatural cause to it? Can they see it coming, or is it a total surprise? How long does it last?
There are a lot of ways you could go with this one! Maybe it’s dry when it should be wet; snowy when it should be mild; maybe there’s a huge unexpected storm in someplace that rarely gets them (like LA or Maine getting hurricanes this past year). Or maybe it’s unseasonably nice weather — so nice that it’s somehow suspicious.
This is also the thing that can become a true chaos agent in your story! Your character needs obstacles on the way to their goal, and sometimes it’s not Human vs. Human or Human vs. Society, it’s Human vs. Nature. How can a sudden change in the weather upset their plans? Does it keep them from getting somewhere they need to be? Stop a message from getting through? Ruin what should have been a perfect day?
Let your worldbuilding help get you unstuck — and if you use the prompt, I’d love to hear about it in a comment!